Restore Failure with Acronis 2017
I have a desktop PC with a gigabyte UEFI dualBIos motherboard, I5 processor, 8 gig of ram that came with Windows 7 pro that has been upgraded to windows 10. My system drive (Crucial 128 GB SSD) was getting full so I decided to upgrade to a larger drive (Crucial 500 GB SSD).
I first put the new drive in a docking station and restored the system drive to it from a backup. Then put the restored drive in the system in place of the working drive. Boot fails. Windows logo comes up, little white circle starts spinning, then stops, screen goes black and every 6 seconds it says "no signal". Stays in this condition till I shut it off or re-boot it.
Tried multiple times from multiple backups - one of the full drive and several of just the OS partitions.
Have tried repairing from a windows 10 pro system ISO CD - failed.
Have disconnected all other hard drives before restoring.
Have tried bootrec /fixmbr /fixboot by themselves and followed by an attempted repair from the Windows 10 pro ISO disk.
Have used diskpart on the restored drives to make the drive letters match up to the orignals after the restore and before the first boot and also booted to the windows ISO after changing them and re-attempted a repair afterwards which in a few cases seemed to make some progress. Windows went into disk checking mode upon startup before failing in the same way as above. Also used diskpart to make the C drive active a few times.
In the middle of all this, the old drive failed completely. I noticed in the bios that it was missing at one point. Moved it to another port - still missing. Moved it to an external USB dock and it worked attached to another computer. Re-installed it - it showed up in the bios, and seemed to be OK. A few restores later it was missing from the bios again. This time it wouldn't work in the usb dock station and seems to be deceased.
I have used acronis successfully half a dozen times over the last 10 years to restore from viruses, malware, botched program installs, and hardware failures on the multiple devices I have. I've got almost 20 hours into this now and I'm pretty close to giving up, reloading windows from scratch and starting over without Acronis, and looking for another solution to prevent having to ever go through this hell again.
I have tried including the disk signature in the restore and not. I have tried deleting the partitions from the new drive and starting fresh before a restore, and not.
Have also tried restoring multiple times from several different backups with an acronis 2019 recovery disk.
Attached are the system info files it let me upload.
Any ideas I haven't tried?
After a week in computer hell, my system has been restored and the fix was pretty simple, but not obvious (at least to me). When I took my SSD in to work for my IT manager to look at, he questioned why the recovery partition had a letter assigned. He said he didn't think either the boot record or recovery partiton should have one.
When you use add disk through Acronus to partition a drive and format, it assigns drive letters to some partitions that should not have one. When I reformatted my new drive, I did the system partition first so it would assign it to drive C and left a gig before and after for the boot record and recovery partitions. (I keep my data on a separate drive.)
After the drive was formatted (as MBR without disk signature checked ), and before I ran the restore, I used a windows restore disk and went into a cmd window in Repair ---> Troubleshoot. Then used diskpart. List volume. Select volume = X for the boot and recovery partitions that shouldn't have a drive letter but were assigned one. After selection -- "remove". This removes the letter.
I also fixed the drive letters on all other partitions that were different than how the system was originally. Again diskpart was used. Select volume; Assign letter = X where X is what the drive letter should be. You may have to remove the letter first from another drive that is already using it.
At the end, run list volume again and check your work. Then exit; exit to leave diskpart and the command window.
I then restored all partitions on the drive from the same image file that hadn't worked the previous 20+ times I tried, re-booted again and it worked. Hallelujiah. It's been through windows updates and reboots and I ran sfc /scannow from a cmd window successfully.
Hopefully, someone else will be helped by this until Acronis gets their act together. I expect better from a company that is in the data protection and recovery business.
Thanks for sharing your update and approach to solving this issue, though sorry it required you to jump through so many hoops to do so!